Event Info This event has been cancelled due to the implementation of stay-at-home notices for new arrivals from the UK. Thank you for your interest.
From Postcolonial Resources to World-Literary Energetics Dr Claire Westall Department of English and Related Literature, University of York Global Cities in World Literature Seminar Series
Resources are typically thought of as the “raw” materials that are extracted and “converted” into commodities and energy, where energy is the ability to act or, better still, do work. And today resource and energy “angst” are abundantly common (MacDonald 2013, 1; 19). In a good number of ways, postcolonial literary studies has been and remains a resourceful and resource- and environment-oriented field, and since the mid-2000s it has benefitted from a new ecocritical impetus, with responses to landscapes and forests, foodways and waterways, trading routes, tourist trails and eco-disasters emerging. Nevertheless, postcolonial literary studies remains hampered by its inability to conceive of empire as central to the long-story of capitalism, and thereby has fallen short of understanding the relational and integrated modes of resource (mis)management and energy extraction at the centre of capitalism’s development. Working out from the strengths of postcolonial analysis and pushing past its deep-seated limitations, this paper explains the usefulness of drawing together three emergent, related and relational fields or modes of enquiry – namely, the energy humanities, world-ecology and world-literary comparativism – in order to establish a new idea of “energetic materialism”; a Marxist-inflected historical, relational and dialectical approach to the material culture of capitalism’s resource-bound work/energy systems; an approach that helps move thinking beyond the resource-conflict dystopias and benign world-ending consensual paralysis synonymous with neoliberal capital. In doing so, it uses a range of literary texts (recognised as postcolonial and/or world-literary) to illustrate how a mobilisation of world-literary energetics is useful for resistive and world-(re)fashioning purposes.
Claire Westall is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. Her forthcoming book is The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature. She is also co-author of The Public on the Public (2015), and co-editor of Prison Writing and the Literary World (2020), Literature of an Independent England (2013) and Cross-Gendered Literary Voices (2012). She has edited special issues of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, one titled ‘Resistant Resources/Resources of Resistance’ and the other ‘The Worldiness of Cricket and its Literature’. Her next sports-linked project will be a book about cricket and world literature. Registration for this event has closed. |